snail & hammer

zeus: It is to be assumed that I do not exist while most people in the vision assume that I do exist. This is to be one of the extents of meaning between the players and the audience. I have to talk like this because I am the lord of both kinds of sky—and I don't mean your sky and their sky because they are signs, I mean the bright sky and the burning sky. I have no intention of showing you my limits. The players in this poem are players. They have taken their parts not to deceive you [or me for that matter] but because they have been paid in love or coin to be players. I have known for a long time that there is not a fourth wall in a play. I am called Zeus and I know this.

When, in 1682, the Reverend Mr Busby, headmaster of Westminster School, expelled or suspended John Dryden’s son, the poet wrote him an excellent letter. Busby had already been at Westminster for more than forty years: he was that terrifying thing, a Great Headmaster. Moreover, Dryden had himself been among his pupils and knew well enough what tricks the old autocrat could get up to. Busby had sent a message by the boy, that he ‘desired to see’ the father. Dryden hastened to assure him that his son ‘did the message’, but he did not obey the summons. His letter begins, indeed, by assuring Dr Busby that he would have come, if he could have found in himself ‘a fitting temper’, meaning, no doubt, that he was in no mood to talk to the headmaster as became an old pupil. His fury and his caution in addressing the great man jostle side by side throughout the letter. He admits or pretends that he found ‘something of kindness’ in the message, for Busby sent the boy away, so he said, in order that he ‘might not have occasion to correct him’ – a necessity more obvious, no doubt, to Busby than to the poet. He gives reasons why the boy’s alleged crime was perhaps ‘not so great’ as Busby seemed to think. Then he tells the headmaster that his first impulse was to send for the boy’s things from the college, without a moment’s delay. That he did not do so was partly out of respect for Dr Busby and partly – and this clearly is the point of the sentence – out of ‘tenderness of doeing anything offensive to my Lord Bishop of Rochester, as cheife Governour of the College’. A threat that the matter might not rest with the headmaster and that the chairman of the governors might hear of it. Dryden is concerned that his son’s chance of election to a university place will have been lost by the upset, and stoutly suggests the boy might as well go to Cambridge at once, ‘of his own election’. The letter concludes with the hope that Dryden will be ‘satisfyed with a favourable answer’ from Dr Busby’s ‘goodnesse and moderation’, so that he may continue his ‘obliged humble servant’, as, of course, every father with a boy at the school would wish to be.

Dürer is entangled in a network of humanist correspondents across Europe who are simultaneously staggeringly learned and on the make, and what emerges from his exchanges with Pirckheimer, Erasmus, Christoph Scheurl, Konrad Celtis, Jakob Wimpheling and others is these men’s remorseless, purposeful struggle in pursuit of a European reputation. Self-promotion is a constant labour, enacted through letters, books and prints. Erasmus sought to invent himself as a modern-day Seneca or Jerome, constructing a version of personality, as Andrée Hayum wrote in 1985, that ‘resided in the cumulative effects of his printed works’: ‘the charisma of the absent professor’, as Lisa Jardine put it in Erasmus, Man of Letters (1993). Erasmus was acutely aware of Dürer’s potential as a maker of fame: he hung Dürer’s engraving of Pirckheimer on his bedroom wall, like a student with a Pulp Fiction poster (‘Wherever I turn I find Willibald gazing at me’).

According to Democritus, Truth lies at the bottom of a well, the depth of which, alas! gives but little hope of release. To be sure, one advantage is derived from this, that the water serves for a mirror, in which Truth may be reflected. I have heard, however, that some philosophers, in seeking for truth to pay homage to her, have seen their own image and adored it instead.

The dilemma is not between being true to one’s inner brilliance and selling out. It’s a weirder, more uneasy question: to remain obscure making one kind of junk or to become well-known making another.

The Argentine poet Lugones* way back in the year 1909, wrote that he thought poets were always using the same metaphors, and that he would try his hand at discovering new metaphors for the moon. And if fact he concocted many hundreds of them. He also said in the foreward to a book called Lunario sentimental, that every word is a dead metaphor. This statement is, of course, a metaphor. *Leopoldo Lugones (187401938), a major Argentie writer of the early twentieth century, was initially a modernist. His Lunario sentimental (Sentimental Moonery) is an eclectic volume of poetry, short stories and plays that revolve around the theme of the moon; it caused quite a scandal when it came out, both for breaking with the already established highbrow modernismo and for mocking the audiences of this trend. Yet I think we all feel the difference between dead and living metaphors. If we take any good etymological dictionary and if we look up any word, we are sure to find a metaphor tucked away somewhere.

To pass a Censure upon all kinds of Writings, to shew their several Excel∣lencies and Defects, and especially to as∣sign each of them to their proper Au∣thors, was the chief Province and the greatest Commendation of the Ancient Critics. And it appears from those Remains of Antiquity that are left us, that they never wanted Employment. For to forge and counterfeit Books, and father them upon Great Names, has been a Practice almost as old as Letters. But it was then most of all in fashion, when the Kings of Pergamus and Alexandria, rivalling one another in the Magnificence and Copiousness of their Libraries, gave great rates for any Treatises that carried the names of celebrated Authors. Which was an Invitation to the Scribes and Copyers of those Times, to enhance the Price of their Wares by ascribing them to Men of Fame and Reputation; and to suppress the true Names, that would have yielded less Money. And now and then even an Author, that wrote for Bread, and made a Traffic of his Labours, would purposely conceal himself, and personate some old Writer of eminent Note; giving the Title and Credit of his Works to the Dead, that himself might the better live by them. But what was then done chiefly for Lucre, was afterwards done out of Glory and Affectation, as an Exercise of Stile, and an Ostentation of Wit. In this the Tribe of the Sophists are principally concerned; in whose Schools it was the ordinary task to compose 〈 in non-Latin alphabet 〉, to make Speeches and write Letters in the Name and Character of some Heroe, or great Commander or Philosopher; 〈 in non-Latin alphabet 〉, What would Achilles, Medea, or Alexander say in such or such Circum∣stances? Thus Ovid, we see, who was bred up in that way, writ Love Letters in the Names of Penelope and the rest. 'Tis true, they came abroad under his own Name; because they were written in Latin and in Verse, and so had no colour or pretence to be the Originals of the Graecian Ladies. But some of the Greek Sophists had the Success and Satisfaction to see their Essays in that kind pass with some Readers for the genuine Works of those they endeavoured to express. This, no doubt, was great Content and Joy to them; being as full a Testimony of their Skill in Imitation; as the Birds gave to the Painter, when they peck'd at his Grapes. One of them indeed, has dealt ingenuously, and confess'd that he feign'd the Answers to Brutus, only as a Trial of Skill: but most of them took the other way, and concealing their own Names, put off their Copies for Originals; prefer∣ring that silent Pride and fraudulent Plea∣sure, though it was to die with them, before an honest Commendation from Po∣sterity for being good Imitators. And to speak freely, the greatest part of Mankind are so easily imposed on in this way, that there is too great Invitation to put the trick upon them.

It is not the obligation of children to befriend classmates who have demonstrated aggressive, unpredictable or violent tendencies.

She Did What She Could [Rhoda Williams McKoon's headstone] Move me, wheel, from the sea, by the Hudson, through woods, fields. My hand on your rim. Growling bellies, oxen smells. Make my feet go like prayers. Have I brought what I need for the world ahead? Who will ask for my stories? Will I find my Snakeroot and Sweet Ciceley? Will the peonies survive? Will I find good dirt, water for a well?

To the onely rewarder, and most iust poiser of vertuous merits, the most hono∣rably renowned No-body, bountious Mecaenas of Poetry, and Lord Protector of oppressed innocence, Do, Dedicoque. SINCE it hath flow'd with the current of my humorous bloode, to affect (a little too much) to be seriously fantasticall: here take (most re∣spected Patron) the worthlesse present of my slighter idlenes. If you vouchsaf not his protectiō then, O thou sweetest perfectiō (Female beautie) shield mee from the stopping of vineger bottles. Which most wished fauour if it faile me; then, Sinequeo flectere superos, A∣cheronta mouebo. But yet, Honours redeemer, vertues aduancer, religions shelter, and pieties fosterer, Yet, yet I faint not in despaire of thy gratious affection & protection: to which I onely shall euer rest most seruingmanlike, obsequiously making legs, and standing (after our free-borne English garbe) bare headed. Thy onely assied slaue, and admirer, I M.

If we understand that design leads to the manifestation of human intention, and if what we make with our hands is to be sacred and honor the earth that gives us life, then the things we make must not only rise from the ground but return to it, soil to soil, water to water, so everything that is received from the earth can be freely given back without causing harm to any living system. This is ecology. This is good design.